National Australia Bank will cut as many as 2,500 roles under a sweeping restructure of the company. The bank's stated aim is to simplify both how it operates and how its workforce is organised. Restructures on this scale typically reach deep into back-office teams, support functions and layers of management, though NAB has not yet mapped out where the axe falls. Removing that many positions represents a sizeable slice of the lender's total headcount, which runs into the tens of thousands. Executives argue that fewer, cleaner structures will make the bank easier to run and cheaper to maintain. Staff and their unions will now push for details on severance, redeployment and which sites are affected. Cost programmes of this kind are usually driven by pressure to fund technology investment while protecting margins. Affected workers will want a timeline and clear answers before the dust settles.